The London School of Economics director Sir Howard Davies recently resigned over a scandal that has connections to Libyan dictator Colonel Qaddafi. The London School of Economics accepted $2.5 million in donations from charities run by Qaddafi. Saif al-Islam has a PhD. from the LSE, but it turns out that his thesis was plagiarized. A wiki page was even set up to prove his thesis was plagiarized. Anonymous Internet activists have been Googling away to get results. About 17 pages have been lifted according to the Wiki page. Below is an example of the plagiarized excerpts:

Wikia was a search projected founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. The company was founded in 2004 and has about 42 employees based in San Mateo, California. Since the company started, they have raised about $14 million in funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital, and Amazon.com.

Jimmy Wales pointed out that Wikia.com itself has seen tremendous growth. It was the fifth growing member community destination in February 2009. The top 4 were Twitter, Zimbio, Facebook, and Multiply. Wikia.com’s Wikianswers Q&A website was seeing the most growth and so the company has decided to pay more attention to that service. Basically Wikia Search wasn’t seeing the success that they were hoping for. Going forward the Wikia Search project will be shut down on March 31, 2009 and it will forward to Wikianswers.

Wikia has laid off 10% of their work-force. The startup co-founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley has about 43 employees in their company. Wikia is a search engine powered by humans. People vote for results as they search for keywords. The lay-off news is contradictory to earlier reports that Wikia was going to lay-off 30%.

Wikia is still hiring interns, advertising salespersons, and a Marketing Manager for Sports & Entertainment. Wikia has raised about $14 million in funding before the end of 2006. The first round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners at $4 million. And the other $10 million was led by Amazon.com. Marc Andreessen, Joi Ito, and Ron Conway was involved with Wikia’s angel round.

According to Quantcast, Wikia receives about 11.8 million uniques per month. Wikia is a also associated with Federated Media.

Wikia is built from MediaWiki, the same application that runs Wikipedia. Wikia launched a toolbar on the same day as Digg, a in August 2008.

The biggest Wikia pages include WoWWiki (World of Warcraft), Wookieepedia (Star Wars), Recipes Wiki, Marvel Database Project, EverQuest II, Memory Alpha (Star Trek), Yu-Gi-Oh!, and FFXIclopedia.

Digg
Kevin Rose announced today that the user-generated news submission site has released Digg Toolbar 1.0.  To download the toolbar, visit the Firefox Add-ons page.  Below are some screen shots that I pulled from Digg.com.

1.)
2.)   
3.)
When going to a website that has already been dugg, the toolbar will notify users that it has already been dugg, how many comments were made on Digg, and will give users the option to Digg the story from the click of a button.  (See screen shot #3)

Digg Toolbar 1.0 will also let users know when there is new popular content that has made it to the Digg homepage.  Notifications can be controlled through filters as demonstrated in screen shot #1.  To hide the Digg toolbar from the browser, click on the Digg guy icon in the navigation bar. (screen shot #3)

The reason why I like this feature is because when I see an article that seems interesting enough to be Dugg or submitted, first I’d have to go to the Digg homepage and click submit.  Then I’d have to copy and paste the URL and find out if there are duplicate stories.  This removes all of those steps and makes my life easier. 

Another reason why I like the Digg toolbar is if you click on Submit when an article has not yet been Dugg, then the Submit a New Link step is automatically populated.

What I don’t like about the Digg toolbar is if you click on Digg It, a new window will open and the user still has to press Digg It for the vote to count.  It’d be cool if it automatically Diggs the vote through the toolbar itself.

Wikia
Dan Lewis of Wikia announced today that the search engine company has created a toolbar of their own called Wikia Evolution.  Wikia Evolution is available on the Firefox Add-On page as well.  Wikia is looking for toolbar users to help them with indexing pages on their search engine.

“We want to make it dead-simple for you to add URLs into our index under appropriate keywords.  Already, we’re the cutting edge when it comes to incorporating user feedback into our search results, so much so that Google is experimenting with eerily similar features,” wrote Lewis on the Wikia blog.  ”Wikia Evolution pushes the envelope even further.  It allows you to quickly and easily add the web page you are on into Wikia Search, directly from your browser, for whatever keyword is appropriate.  Instant indexing!   Then, you can modify the search result to make it really killer, all without leaving the page you’re on.”

Below is a screen shot of what the toolbar does when adding it to Firefox.  Users can begin to Add and Rate websites from other search engines to better index them on Wikia.

A couple of new toolbars from a couple of strong Web 2.0 companies launched in one day proves that Web 2.0 innovation is not slowing down.

Jimmy Wales started the Wiki craze and Wikipedia has always been the epitome of open source, a community of developers coming together to make something great.  When Wikia Search first launched in Alpha mode, users did not appear to be impressed, but they were interested in the concept.

Now Wales has fired up Wikia again, but this time it is a more robust and impressive version where anyone that surfs over to the site can vote on their favorite search results based on a 5-star system. 

Below is a screen shot:

Wikia does not index the search results themselves.  The search results are aggregated content by pulling keyword search results from a combination of Google & Yahoo! When a user puts the mouse over a search result, users will be able to vote on the star system and/or Edit, Annotate, Spotlight, Comment, or Delete the result.

I am a strong believer in open source. In Feb. 2007, I wrote an article talking about how Digg could take on Google by leveraging their community-base to vote for search results too.  The concept of Wikia turned out to be pretty similar.

Wikipedia monetizes their site by donations, but how will Wikia make money?  Federated Media.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia has recently released a new open source project.  The new project is supposed to be a search engine that an open source community builds, similar to Wikipedia.  The open source tool used for the platform is Nutch and the index of web pages that revolve around Wikia currently was put together by Grub, a web crawler that Wikia acquired.

While there was a lot of hype built around Wikia’s search, the company insists that it is merely an alpha release and the search result quality will be low initially.  Michael Arrington’s review did not go favorably for the product, thus causing Wales to respond personally.  The debate is that Wikia was supposed to be a Google killer, but the alpha does not look impressive.

Release early, release often.

It’s a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine. We’ve been telling everyone that constantly. I’m sorry Michael’s disappointed, but having said that, we didn’t build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases.

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it.

We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.

-Jimmy Wales [comment on TechCrunch post linked above]

Just for reiteration, the difference between Wikia and Google upon early release is that the founders of Google found out how to download and index the Internet before releasing their search engine as mentioned in the book, The Google Story.  Wikia simply released with low quality to finally let the open source community flood in, go to work on the site, and create quality search results.  I first wrote about Wikia in December 2006 when the name was speculated to be Wikiasari.

I’ll hold off on reviewing Wikia Search in depth because it still has a lot of growing to do.  Wikipedia didn’t become the biggest open source encyclopedia a day after it went into public alpha, but now its the #9 most visited web site according to Alexa.  I’m not in the position to judge anything just yet.  This blog post is to just make people aware that the release is officially open.

Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley’s Wikia project announced yesterday that the company is opening four new open source projects.  The four new open source online magazines focus on Restaurants.wikia, Foodie.wikia, Fitness.wikia, and Mortgages.wikia.

“As with our other open-source magazine sites, we hope that the new sites launched today continue to give people the opportunity to create and share information on the topics that are most important to them,” stated Dan Lewis, the VP of Business Development at Wikia.

Restaurants.wikia allows users to write reviews and articles for restaurants and upload menus.  Over 20,000 restaurants across New York City, LA, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Boston have been added.

Popular articles can be subscribed to via RSS and users can rate and tag restaurants.  One of the most popular articles is the Top 5 Creative Sushi Rolls of the Upper East Side for New York City.

Foodies.wikia is for food connoisseurs.  Users of Foodies.wikia can add recipes, create cookbooks, contribute food-related articles, and blog.

Food data can be filtered by Appetizers, Main Dishes, Side Dishes, Desserts, Salads, Soups, Snacks, Condiments, and Other.  Recipes can be rated on a 5 star scale. 

Fitness.wikia focuses in on physical fitness related articles and contains sections that include Weight Loss, Weight Training, Exercising, and Nutrition.

There is a voting system for articles on Fitness.wikia and there is a section for Top Rated Energy Drinks.

Mortgage.wikia is for users who want to discuss mortgages.  This project is for first-time buyers, users who are applying for a mortgage, interested in refinancing, those who have made mortgage mistakes, and those who have bad credit.

[Previous Pulse 2.0 coverage of Jimmy Wales' ventures]

Yesterday, all of the Wikiseek Beta Testers received an e-mail from John Holland, Chief Marketing Officer of Searchme, Inc. that Wikiseek: Community Edition was launched.  Wikiseek was launched around January.  The company that created Wikiseek is called SearchMe and is based in Palo Alto, CA.  The company had raised $5 million in funding for its projects by Sequoia Capital.

Wikiseek is a search engine for Wikipedia and was made with assistance and permission from Wikipedia.  Wikiseek features tag clouds for the search as well.  Below is a screenshot of a search for Tourette’s:

Wikiseek: Community Edition claims itself as “the world’s first wiki-based community-editable search engine.”  However, I believe that Jimmy Wales’ for-profit Search Wikia which is also an open source user-editable was the first.  Using Wikiseek: Community Edition, all users would be empowered to:

1. You may add more relevant sites to these search results.
2. You can change the order of search results to promote sites that are more relevant, or demote sites that are less relevant.
3. You can also remove site that are not relevant, and remove sites that are spam.

There are feedback forums for Wikiseek: Community Edition on Wikia.